II

ORDINARILY the London Gazette – ‘Published by Authority’ of His Majesty’s Britannic Government – appeared twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, variably priced between sixpence and four shillings. It would contain royal proclamations, government announcements, notices of parliamentary Acts, naval and military promotions, and the names of all gentlemen recently declared bankrupt together with proceedings against them in the Court of Insolvency. Occasionally a ‘Supplement’ to the Saturday issue might be published on Monday or to that of Tuesday on Thursday. Extraordinary events, however, called for an issue of the Gazette that was not merely supplementary to a preceding one. So on the morning of Thursday 22 June, as placards were hung on the gates of the Mansion House and cannon fired in jubilation from the Tower and in the Regent’s Park, a London Gazette EXTRAORDINARY brought the full text of the Waterloo dispatch to public attention.

The history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon secured his copy and read it through four times at a single sitting. He was unable to paint for excitement and because his servant and model, Corporal John Sammons, late of the Horse Guards – who ‘seemed astounded that the Battle of Waterloo had been won and he not present’¹ – had taken himself off to get drunk with his former comrades in arms. Haydon read the Gazette again before going to bed and ‘dreamt of it & was fighting & waking all night’, getting up the next morning ‘in a steam of intense feeling’. He read it yet again and ordered the Courier for a month. Then he went to a confectioner’s shop and read all the London papers till his stomach ached. By the following day he had read the Gazette so many times he knew it by heart.

He dined with Leigh Hunt on Sunday 25 June, the battle monopolising conversation and fuelling argument.

‘Terrible Battle this, Haydon.’

‘A glorious one, Hunt.’

‘Oh, certainly.’

But Hunt had more sympathy for Bonaparte than for the alliance of despotic princes that had defeated him. After all, he and his brother had just completed a two-year term of imprisonment for libelling the Prince Regent. He argued that, even vanquished, ‘Buonaparte may be the means of producing something better because he is not so powerful as he was formerly, to push his victories to the extent he did, so that he may work an improvement in others, and be even under its influence himself.’² Hunt had concluded his Examiner editorial published that morning with the fervent hope that some benefit might issue from the carnage:

In one point of view, nothing but affliction and disgust present themselves to the mind at the sight of so many lives destroyed, so many public burdens increased, and so much misery of all sorts occasioned to families; but in another point, the very excess of the thing produces a hope of better days; for if both parties should be speedily exhausted, there will be good ground for their coming to a reasonable accommodation; and if the war should last long, and they should go on so as to make any material and final exhaustion of their respective military strengths, there is hope that the mere brute force of governments may be obliged to lie quiet a little, and the civil power, intellect, and rights of the community at large, be heard and be felt in their own cause.³

But Haydon had no patience with such nuances. For him the matter was simple: the Duke of Wellington had ‘saved for this age the intellect of the world’, while, ‘had Napoleon triumphed we would have been brought back to barbarism’. Having visited Paris the previous year, he had little faith that any ‘reasonable accommodation’ was to be expected from the French:

Vain, insolent, thoughtless, bloodthirsty, and impetuous by nature, – so susceptible to glory as to have their little sense blinded by that bubble, a people who are brilliant without intensity, have courage without firmness, are polite without benevolence, tender without heart, – pale, fierce, and elegant in their looks, depraved, lecherous, and blasphemous in their natures! Good God!⁴

When the first British troops began to arrive back in London, Corporal Sammons brought several wounded men of his acquaintance to Haydon’s painting room, where his master and the Scottish artist David Wilkie listened with relish to gruesome tales of close combat. One man described Corporal John Shaw cutting a Frenchman ‘right through his brass helmet to the chin’ so that ‘his face fell off him like a bit of apple’. Another had watched Shaw die, his ‘side torn off by a shell’. Private Hodgson of the 2nd Life Guards regaled the two painters with a first-hand account of fighting a Cuirassier: ‘The first cut he gave was on the cuirass [and] the shock nearly broke his arm … [then] dropping the reins, and guiding his horse with his knees, as the Cuirassier at last gave point, [Hodgson] cut his sword hand off, and then dashing the point of his sword into the man’s throat turned it round and round.’

Wilkie would later paint his masterpiece for the Duke of Wellington – The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch – asking and receiving from His Grace the astonishing sum of 1,200 guineas for it. One particularly telling detail of the crowded composition moved the French painter Théodore Géricault to tears: a young woman – mouth and nose obscured by a corner of the Gazette Extraordinary – all eyes as she anxiously scans the casualty list. The painting would be the sensation of the 1822 Royal Academy exhibition. For his part Haydon would receive a commission from a consortium of Liverpool gentlemen for a life-size picture of the Duke and his horse imagined surveying the field of Waterloo twenty years after. He would also paint twenty-six versions of another imaginary scene: Napoleon Musing on St Helena. But for the time being, both painters were content to listen, agog, to the soldiers’ tales, and they ‘kept the poor fellows long and late, and rewarded them well’.⁵

However, there were other civilians who were unwilling to hear or speak of the battle. On 28 June at Trostan Hall, Suffolk, none of the dinner-party guests ‘durst even mention the subject’⁶ in the presence of their host, the radical lawyer Capel Lofft, so distressed was he by Bonaparte’s downfall. The embargo was ‘concerted separately with each of the guests as he arrived; it was understood that this precaution was requisite to ensure [Lofft’s] attendance at dinner’.⁷

Nobody took the news of Waterloo so badly, according to Haydon, as did William Hazlitt: ‘It is not to be believed how the destruction of Napoleon affected him; he seemed prostrated in mind and body: he walked about unwashed, unshaved, hardly sober by day, and always intoxicated by night, literally, without exaggeration, for weeks …’ And around this shambling malcontent a drunken multitude rejoiced.

The guns that thundered across London at ten o’clock on the morning after Percy’s arrival with the Waterloo dispatch marked the official start of national celebrations. When darkness fell, celebration required illumination: the most rudimentary means was a lamp or candle placed in the window, more sophisticated displays being made with coloured designs painted on parchment and lit from behind, while the most elaborate were those in which entire buildings flamed with multicoloured configurations of oil lamps. Business thrived on fulfilling the demand for patriotic show.

‘IN Honour of the GLORIOUS VICTORY’, Fawley’s Manufactory in Blackfriars Road offered ‘A large ASSORTMENT of ILLUMINATION TRANSPARENCIES, designed by the first Artists, and painted in a very superior style, for the present glorious occasion, to be LENT or SOLD.’⁸ The New Metallic Colour Works in Brydges Street, Covent Garden, respectfully informed the public ‘that ILLUMINATION LAMPS, of all colours, ready attired for lighting, with Devices, Transparencies, &c. may be had on the lowest terms’ from their warehouse in Old Street, opposite Vinegar Yard, and that ‘Public Buildings and Gentlemen’s Houses [were to be] illuminated on very low terms, at the shortest notice’.⁹ The last time illuminations had been required on so large a scale by the ‘Nobility, Gentry and others’ was just a year before, to celebrate the ‘Proclamation of Peace’. On that occasion a Lambeth ironmonger by the name of Turk boasted a stock of ‘thirty thousand and upwards’ of such lamps at ‘7/6 per dozen and devices appropriate’.¹⁰

By Friday night London’s West End was ‘in a blaze’, drawing crowds into the streets ‘greater, if possible than on the first night of lighting up in honour of the Victory of Vitoria’. The most common illuminations comprised initials: ‘GR’ or ‘GRIII’ for King George, ‘GPR’ for the Prince Regent, one surmounted by a crown, the other by the Prince of Wales feathers. The Duke of Wellington was sometimes represented by ‘DW’, or a ‘W’ stood for both the hero and his battle. Elsewhere his name appeared in full, sometimes alongside that of his Prussian ally. ‘WELLINGTON and BLÜCHER’ adorned the Horse Guards in Whitehall with laurel branches picked out in green lamps. The House of Commons display had ‘WELLINGTON, BLÜCHER, and VICTORY’ in gold, branches of laurel, ‘pyramidal rows of lamps; a triumphal arch in the centre [with] parallel rows of lamps, red and yellow’. Along the facade of the Admiralty was emblazoned ‘WELLINGTON UNCONQUERED’. Lord Castlereagh’s office had the letters of WELLINGTON arranged in a semicircle over the portico, three rows of laurels underneath, crossed swords at the base and the British Star, surmounted by an imperial crown, flanked by English and Prussian standards unfurled. And on the parapet of the building cannon and cannon balls were composed in yellow lamps, laurels in green, with the Prince Regent’s initials, ‘GPR’, and the names of the allies, ‘BLÜCHER’ and ‘ORANGE’, all ‘wreathed with lamps’. The house of Charles Arbuthnot, who had travelled with Major Percy on the final leg of his journey only forty-eight hours earlier, was decorated with the captured eagle standards portrayed in lamps. The eccentric radical, and epic pedestrian, John ‘Walking’ Stewart illuminated his house in Cockspur Street with a transparency reading: ‘The Secret of British Victory is in the Bayonet.’ The Ordnance Office, predictably, had a design of ‘cannon placed in every appropriate situation, with castellated ornaments and emblems of military tactics’. The Opera House in Covent Garden particularly excelled in allegorical artistry: ‘A grand Transparency, representing Britannia succouring France, personified by an interesting Female figure in a suppliant posture, attired in a robe covered with fleur de lis; on her side stands the British Lion. A group of attributes, and above, with expanded wings, appears a figure of Fame sounding the trumpet.’¹¹

The most entertaining illuminations were those put up in front of commercial premises with perhaps as much an eye to the attraction of custom as inspiring patriotic sentiments. The publican of a tavern under the sign of the cockerel devised a large transparency of a game bird strutting over his fallen adversary above the legend ‘ENGLAND THE COCK OF THE WALK!’ The publisher and print seller Rudolph Ackermann advertised his ‘Repository of Arts’ in the Strand with ‘a most humorous Transparency, about fifteen foot long’ designed by Thomas Rowlandson:

The Duke of Wellington, Bonaparte, and Prince Blücher, all on horseback: Bonaparte flying frightened, and pursued by Wellington, is running direct into the arms of Blücher, who is prepared to meet him with an engine of destruction (an English blunderbuss). The desperate situation of Bonaparte is finely depicted, not only in his countenance but even in his frightened horse. His eagles are seen to fly from him in swarms.’¹²

Further along the Strand from Ackermann’s, outside Somerset House – its entire front shining with ‘WELLINGTON TRIUMPHANT’, a ‘W’ enclosed within two branches of laurel, and ‘a star of great magnitude atop the pillars and cornices’ – crowds blocked the street and refused to let carriages pass until the coachmen ‘took off their hats as an acknowledgment of the favour’. The tossing of squibs and firecrackers into gentlefolk’s coaches was a popular jape, ‘and the alarm which the ladies were consequently thrown into appeared to delight John Bull exceedingly’. Jokes were invented and told, circulated and printed in the press: that Napoleon had wanted to reach Brussels but he couldn’t get past Uxbridge; that Napoleon’s marshals did not have any Orders of the Bar but now they had a lot of Crosses; that Wellington had never seen Bonaparte before but now he had seen him both before and behind.

*

As celebrations continued, those that mourned were not forgotten. Joseph Ballard, ‘a young Boston merchant’ visiting London, was appalled at the degree to which the English were ‘forever upon the alert to make money out of everything’.¹³ He noticed particularly an enterprising undertaker whose advertisement appeared in the Morning Chronicle offering repatriation of the dead:

To the Relations and Friends of those who have FALLEN in the late Glorious VICTORY. – The anxious desire naturally prevalent for the possession of the remains of a beloved Relation being seldom capable of gratification, from the great difficulty of the removal … a Gentleman who has peculiar advantages by an establishment at Ostend, as well as at Bruxelles, and proposes to facilitate that difficult task, and to undertake their speedy removal to London or elsewhere, by a mode of envelopement superior to leaden enclosures in many respects.¹⁴

For every man killed there was a circle of relatives requiring black. Layton and Shears, of Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, announced a ‘NEW ARTICLE for FAMILY MOURNING … just invented … which never creases or tumbles, possessing a degree of softness peculiar to itself, the colour of which is a beautiful jet black, warranted never to turn brown’. The same firm also offered: ‘of their own manufacture Bombazeens of matchless colour and quality, from 2s. 6d to 5s. 6d per yard; Italian Gauzes, Crapes, Lustres, Poplins, Satins, striped Gauzes, and every article of fashionable Mourning’.¹⁵ Thomas & Co. of Fleet Street informed customers they had ‘recently laid in a very extensive Stock of everything suitable for Fashionable Mourning’ and tried to undercut competition by offering it ‘at least 20 per cent below the usual prices’.¹⁶

Royal protocol necessitated the court going into two months of suitably ostentatious mourning for ‘his late Serene Highness The Duke of Brunswick Oels’. The hero of Quatre Bras and noblest-ranking fatality of the Waterloo campaign was nephew to George III and brother-in-law to the Prince Regent through his despised and estranged wife Princess Caroline. The requirements of court mourning were stipulated by the Lord Chamberlain’s office and published in the Gazette:

The Ladies to wear black silk, plain muslin, or long-lawn crape, or love hoods, black silk shoes, black glazed gloves, and black paper fans. Undress – Black or dark grey unwatered tabbies. The Gentlemen to wear black cloth, without buttons on the sleeves or pockets, plain muslin or long-lawn cravats, and weepers, black swords and buckles. Undress – Dark grey frocks.¹⁷

The period of ‘deep mourning’ was to last a month, ‘the first fortnight in the second month to be half mourning, and the last fortnight of the two months to be slight’.¹⁸

*

In marked contrast to the Prince Regent’s enforced, uncharacteristic and doubtless reluctant sobriety of dress and demeanour, the flamboyant Grand Gala Nights at Vauxhall Gardens, advertised as ‘Under the Patronage of His Royal Highness’, continued. On the night Percy arrived with the Waterloo dispatch, Sir Edwin Sandys, director of music at Vauxhall, raised his baton and the band struck up with a Handel aria from Judas Maccabaeus, dedicated in 1747 to George II’s son William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, known as ‘Butcher’ Cumberland after his brutal suppression of the Jacobite rising the previous year. Subsequently used as an anthem to any victorious commander, after 18 June 1815 it would be inextricably identified with the Duke of Wellington:

See, the-e conqu’ring he-he-he-he-hero comes!

Sa-a-a-a-ound the trum-pets, bea-ea-eat the drums.¹⁹

Two nights later the hero’s name was honoured in fire at Vauxhall by the most dazzling display of illuminations London had to offer:

Pre-eminently distinguished, the name of the immortal WELLINGTON and his brave army, [were] inscribed in prodigious large Roman characters, in gold coloured lamps, thickly surrounded and interspersed with diamond and laurel leaves, the fresh green of which, contrasted with the broad glare of the lamps, which had the most happy effect, and softened that light which would otherwise have been almost insupportable … The amusements concluded with a grand display of Pyrotechnic invention … The last subject exhibited was the front of a Grecian temple, in the centre of which appeared the word WELLINGTON in characters of living flame.²⁰

*

Just a week after the dispatch arrived, at one o’clock on 28 June, a large gathering of ‘MERCHANTS, BANKERS, TRADERS, and others’²¹ assembled at the City of London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, ‘to consider of the propriety of a PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION for the RELIEF of the SUFFERERS in the late GLORIOUS BATTLES’.²² The first to donate was a Mr John Fuller, who promised 200 guineas and made a speech hoping that other gentlemen would follow his example ‘and leave off buying baubles and nonsense, and a pack of fooleries, at the sales and exhibitions of Bond Street’. The hundred or so individuals and businesses represented at the meeting subscribed immediately the further sum of £9,488. On 30 June, the fund had increased to £21,216, a week later to £38,171, and by 13 July it stood at £74,540. 11s. 8d. The Morning Post of 9 August published some lines of verse ON THE WATERLOO SUBSCRIPTION REACHING THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS:

Hail, Britain! Thy bounty, beyond all dispute,

Must with wonder strike other lands dumb;

When they see that thy heroes, as victory’s fruit,

Receive from thy kindness a plumb.*

A plumb for those who fought and bled,

Already they declare;

But some have confidently said,

We’ll make that plumb a pair.

The City of London’s lead was quickly followed by the City of Westminster, and during ‘a most respectable meeting of … Noblemen and Gentlemen’²³ at the Thatched House Tavern in St James’s, with HRH the Duke of York in the chair, it was agreed ‘That a general Subscription be entered into for the special relief of the relations of the Soldiers of the British Army … who fell in the Battle of Waterloo … and that the subscriptions so raised should be consolidated into one Fund with those obtained in the City of London.’ By the middle of August, subscriptions from Westminster amounted to £23,774.17s.11d, while those to the City of London had reached £110,420.8s. It was reported that ‘Similar Subscriptions are making in Southwark, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Northampton, Leeds, York, Exeter, and other Cities and Towns of the Empire, and are [expected] in the Eastern and Western Colonies and Dependencies.’²⁴

On 27 June, the same day as the inaugural meeting at the City of London Tavern was advertised in the Morning Post, management of the King’s Theatre announced its own charitable plans:

IN HONOUR of the ever MEMORABLE BATTLE GAINED OVER the FRENCH … at WATERLOO, and for the BENEFIT of the DISTRESSED WIDOWS and CHILDREN of those SOLDIERS who have so BRAVELY and GLORIOUSLY FALLEN on the occasion. The Nobility, Subscribers to the Opera, and the Public are respectfully informed that on Thursday, the 6th of July, a GRAND PERFORMANCE will take place at this Theatre, arranged and composed for the exclusive purpose above mentioned. Full particulars of which will be announced in a few days.²⁵

Within three days the programme was taking shape. One act of an as yet unspecified GRAND SERIOUS OPERA was to be performed, followed by ‘an appropriate Address, written by a distinguished literary character’. Beethoven’s ‘celebrated Battle Piece’ – composed in commemoration of Wellington’s triumph over the French at Vitoria – was to be given, by permission of the Prince Regent, to whom it had been dedicated in 1813. The evening would conclude with ‘a splendid Ballet Cantata, composed and arranged for the occasion … music by Laverati; the Dances by Mr A. Vestris, in which all the Opera Performers, and the whole of the Corps de Ballet will be brought forward. The stage will be greatly extended; and the triumph of a most magnificent and classical order.’ The classical dress would do little to disguise the topicality of the entertainment: CAESAR’S TRIUMPH OVER THE GAULS. There would be military bands playing at the entrances to the theatre and the whole building was to be ‘superbly illuminated, and decorated with laurel’.²⁶